A/N: Music "Pinball Wizard", the Who. Thanks to my lovely beta, SpockLovesCats, if you like Spock/Uhura, check out her fantastic ST2009 story, The Way Back. All errors are my own.

Head bowed, he laces his fingers together in front of his body as if in reverential prayer, then turns his palms outwards and stretches his arms high above, knuckles and shoulders popping in percussive release. He is the fighter before a prize bout, head proudly forward, posture straight, lanky body clad in Starfleet charcoal uniform pants and a close-fitting tee. The dark clothing serves to illuminate his pale skin even further. He steps up to the podium of his fate and lifts a slim leg up and over into the impossibly shiny black pod, its side door extended like the menacing wing-case of a cockroach. As he draws his limbs in to sit, the door hisses its insectoid retraction, and all is sense-depriving unnatural silence, and the type of darkness encountered by a man awoken to find himself interred alive.

"Computer, engage program four point sixteen," his hands are damp and he rubs them on his thighs.

A washed-out sepia light begins to gently flicker inside the pod.

The biography, many years in the future, would say: Pavel Andreievich Chekov was a Human who served as a Starfleet officer during the latter half of the 23rd century. At sixteen he found it difficult to believe he would reach graduation, as the likelihood of his spontaneous human combustion prior to that event seemed high. Being a feted boy-genius was really not all it was cracked up to be. Whose stupid idea was it to allow a fourteen-year-old boy into Starfleet Academy? Ah yes, his mama's; she had signed the release papers, an ironic turn of phrase as, for Chekov, there was to be precious little release.

Did she not realise that he would be surrounded by keg parties but barred from imbibing? Surrounded by beautiful women who thought he was, "cute", "sweet", and "jail bait", who told him his accent was "adorable"? What fresh hell was this? By the time he hit sixteen he had been advanced a year and was "like a little brother" to all the girls in his classes, and the hormonal overload was enough to send him into a state of volcanic eruption. He rose at the sight of a leather-clad calf, a glimpse of white cotton beneath a red mini-skirt, the travel of a wrist-bone beneath smooth skin as a stray hair was tucked behind an ear, the view of a firm, furred peach sitting on a cafeteria plate. He knew he was in serious trouble when he began to fantasize about fruit. Thankfully the Starfleet legal-size PADD covered a multitude of indiscretions. There were some nice girls of his age working in stores and cafes outside Starfleet, but his closeted, two-year-long incarceration meant conversation could be a little limited.

"What do you do, cute Russian?"

"I am expert in transwarp theory, quantum mechanics and stellar cartography."

"Oh…that's…nice…"

At this point the girl usually looked at her shoes, made her excuses and bustled off, while Chekov looked into the distance and huffed out an "oy-yoi-yoi-yoi". As this dry patch continued, if it could indeed be called a dry patch, as there had so far, been no wet patch, Chekov did the only sensible thing he could. To keep his teenage mind occupied, he turned his not inconsiderable skill towards video games. Of course, being Starfleet, they were called simulations, and were the mother and father of all video games. If his wrist was going to get a work-out, it may as well be doing something constructive; he was never a boy to pass time idly. The first time he slid into one of the menacing black pods it was like being enveloped by the arms of a gentle lover, he ran his hands appreciatively over the smooth, velvet-black interior and knew, he had come home. As an extra precaution, he also took up running, a lot of running.

The Beamers, as the simulation pods were affectionately known, were tricky beasts; not only did the player have to beam moving targets, but they were also required to simultaneously work out three-dimensional navigational trajectories. Velocity, drag, pressure, gravitational pull and atmospheric particulates made up a Russian nesting Doll's set of factors that could compromise the beaming of a target. Chekov loved it; this way he could be his intelligent self without an audience, nobody doing the "head cock towards shoulder" routine when they looked at him to say, "aww you got 100.5% in Quantum Mechanics, cutie," or worse, "you came all the way from Russia, to study stellar cartography?" This type of judgment, frequently accompanied by the obligatory hair-ruffle, got on his last nerve - did they not even know of Sputnik? The Beamer didn't judge him, it didn't know what he looked like or even how old he was; it just knew him as WarpFactor16, he was glad, and all was well.

For the first time in Starfleet he shame-facedly found himself relying on his boyish, Russian fish-out-of-water bewilderment act. The controller of time-allocation on the Beamers was a lady old enough to be his mama, and she always allowed him a bit more on his maximum allocation. Not that he was solitary, he still socialised with classmates and the running club, but the charge of hormones through his system seemed to be taking the opposite course to the expected one. He just couldn't sleep very much, calculations whizzed through his head like fireworks, he was in a heightened state of alert and, rather than disturb his room-mate, he found himself creeping off to the Beamer array for a couple of hours each night, puppy-dog expression plastered firmly onto his earnest young face.

There was only one dull spot in Chekov's brightly-lit new-found sense of purpose. Half way through his final year, some Beamer geek, Marooned39, suddenly started playing remotely, and he was beating his scores, soundly. Nobody beat Chekov! He was simultaneously awed, jealous, angry and obsessed; he needed to get this geek, his sanity depended on it. If he could just do this one thing, he would be the best Starfleet had, his position on the Enterprise would be sealed, and finally, when he turned eighteen, a girl might just look his way without first thinking of ruffling his unruly locks. For the first time ever he tapped his finger on the instant messaging portion of the screen, grateful for written communication, as even after almost three years, his accent occasionally caused problems. To defeat your enemy, you must first know them, that was a Russian proverb.

WarpFactor16 Hello, you must be very bored, as I am. What is your name?

Marooned39 Well, hello there, I wondered when you were gonna show up. I'm sorry, the name, that's classified information.

WarpFactor16 ! - ??

Marooned39 Aye, well, I got in a bit of trouble with Starfleet.

WarpFactor16 Oh, that sounds exciting!

Marooned39 Eh, well, not really. I'm stuck on an uninhabited engineering test station with nothing to do but play remote Beamer, and talk to my assistant, who can't speak Standard, doesn't have the same vocal apparatus as a human, eh, no offence if yer not human. Anyway, don't follow my example, it's just not funny.

WarpFactor16 You are very good, and I am human.

Marooned39 Cheers, thanks. It's either that or the wanking, and I really don't think my assistant would be too cheery about that.

WarpFactor16 Hahaha! It is the same for me!

Marooned39 Your assistant doesn't like you wanking either?

WarpFactor16 No, I mean this is distraction from the ladies.

Marooned39 Are you a lad?

WarpFactor16 I do not understand.

Marooned39 A guy? A male?

WarpFactor16 Yes, I am. Youngest Starfleet recruit. I am sixteen.

Marooned39 Aye, me too, well, I mean I'm a guy. I haven't seen sixteen for 23 years though, and I haven't seen a lassie - I mean a lady - in two months. It's a tragedy.

WarpFactor16 Two months! Oh Bozhe! That is hard.

Marooned39 I'm telling ya, it certainly is son, very hard. I haven't seen a sandwich in that time either, dunno what's worse. That's an impressive record, starting so young. You Russian?

WarpFactor16 Da, yes.

Marooned39 That's cool man.

WarpFactor16 Thank you.

Marooned39 So, awesome scores on the Beamer, you're almost catching me up.

WarpFactor16 Yes, I really would like to beat you, not meaning to be offensive.

Marooned39 No offence taken son, an admirable goal. No sense wasting all that time to come second, especially to an old guy.

WarpFactor16 You are in engineering?

Marooned39 Aye.

WarpFactor16 Where are you?

Marooned39 Trust me man, you don't want to know. Let's just say in a land far, far away.

WarpFactor16 They really marooned you? What did you do?

Marooned39 Aye, well, it's a bit embarrassing, I was a bit cleverer than my old instructor, well, my boss by then, and I showed him up, kind of. And I did an experiment in beaming that didn't go too well. Luckily it wasny a person.

WarpFactor16 Cleverer than your instructor? Wasny?

Marooned39 Sorry, got a bit colloquial there, wasny is Glaswegian for - was not.

WarpFactor16 Glaswegian? What is that language? I do not know it.

Cleverer than my instructor? Those four simple words rattled around in Chekov's brain. There was a reason he couldn't beat Marooned39; he was practically playing himself. Of all the folks, in all of Starfleet, he finally found someone who understood. Chekov almost hugged the Beamer in excitement, he had found a worthy opponent, not an enemy, a sparring partner.

Four months passed, fierce matches turned into tutorials, quantum equations were fired back and forth through sub-space channels for critique, and conversations went on long into the night about the possibility of trans-warp beaming. Towards the end of WarpFactor16's final year, Marooned39 was the grateful recipient of some of his mama's best recipes, with photographs and luscious descriptions. "Food porn" for a man who complained endlessly that he hadn't seen so much as a sandwich in six months. The end of Starfleet term came, and the spectre of a long-promised final match hung between two friends who'd never even met and didn't know each other's names. Chekov felt it like the anticipation before a final exam, although he had never before gone to an exam thinking he might be awarded less than full marks.

Leaning back in his moulded chair, he studied the screen in the pod.

Final score in time limit

Marooned39
Beams - 137; average time to initiate beam - 1.90 seconds; number of losses - 1

WarpFactor16
Beams - 135; average time to initiate beam - 1.91 seconds; number of losses - 0

Suddenly, winning didn't matter so much to Chekov, it was all, quite literally, academic.

WarpFactor16 You lost someone!

Marooned39 Aye, it happens son.

WarpFactor16 You were going too fast!

Marooned39 Nope, it's the luck of the draw, beaming is not infallible, ya canny change the laws of physics, or account for every situation.

WarpFactor16 You were too fast.

Marooned39 Look, let's talk properly, why don't you sleep on it an we'll speak tomorrow, I'll get a sub-space voice channel.

Tomorrow's talk never happened. The next day was full of the trial of some cadet who cheated on the Kobayashi Maru, then klaxons, then the Enterprise, all in a breath-stealing flash.

The first time Chekov beamed beings aboardthe Enterprise, it was with a triumphal shout.

The second time was with disbelief, horror, and impotent rage.

He now knew -- the hard way -- that there was a difference between a simulation and a field situation, and he bitterly wished he had been able to have that final conversation.

Trying to be useful, he flew through calculations, his brain-cells almost smoking with effort. He prayed for absolution through effectiveness and his suggestion for concealing the Enterprise from Nero was well met. Once, he glimpsed the strange, unaccountably new engineer talking to McCoy and looking in his direction, but he thought no more about it, caught up in the maelstrom.

On the limp home, the new engineer approached Chekov's bridge station. He pinned him with a quizzical curiosity, arms folded, legs planted, back straight. At last he spoke: "WarpFactor16?"

Chekov leaped from his seat. "Marooned39?"

Marooned39 grabbed Chekov's shoulder in a warm clasp, grabbing his right hand in a firm shake. "I'm really glad to meet you man, awesome physics there, excellent job."

Chekov stayed mute, looking into the engineer's eyes, feeling the companionable hand on his shoulder, and the firm handshake.

"We'll talk later, OK?"

"Yes," Chekov swallowed, "I would like to talk, very much."